


Seventeen robotic cats of the Lalonde Laboratory

by asterCrash



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Androids, Cyberpunk, F/F, Gothic, Illustrated, Post-Apocalypse, Vampires, vampire androids
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-19
Updated: 2015-11-26
Packaged: 2018-05-02 09:54:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5243948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asterCrash/pseuds/asterCrash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the Cyberpocalypstuck Universe at the behest of MorbidOptimist</p><p>Drabbles about the many robotic cats wandering around the abandoned cathedral turned laboratory/home of the Lalonde sisters as they work to fix their world following society's collapse and humanity's retreat from the surface.</p><p>Featuring Roxy Lalonde as Scientist Supreme and humanity's greatest hope<br/>Rose Lalonde as a reclusive bookworm who enjoys her sister's company and unrestricted internet access<br/>Kanaya Maryam as a vampiric android seeking a means of uniting the limited series 7R011 prototypes and finding a way to restart mass production of her race<br/>Porrim Maryam as a girl out for a good time, but otherwise on the same quest as her circuitclone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. First Cat

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MorbidOptimist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MorbidOptimist/gifts).



> MorbidOptimist wanted stuff to draw and that spiralled out of control until we had an AU  
> You can check out all her art for it here: http://themorbidoptimist.tumblr.com/tagged/Cyberpocalypstuck

“Is that the last of ‘em?” Roxy called out from across the room. Rose gave a nod to indicate that yes, this was the last fucking box of heavy shit she was ever going to carry up a flight of stairs. At long last, they were moved in. “Cool, cool. I’ll get to work on the beds, do you want to get started on the vertical garden?”

Rose gave a very exasperated sigh and looked longingly at her arm chair, sitting over in the corner looking so very inviting. Then she nodded and trudged over to the bank of stained glass windows through which light entered the room. Near as they could tell some kind of rockslide had buried the left side of the cathedral but they hadn’t yet risked the electrical storm outside to inspect the building’s exterior. That meant that until they got the roof replaced as they intended, the sole source of natural light would be coming from the right, and that dictated the garden’s placement. Not because they would be relying on natural light of course, the first thing Rose got to work on was rigging up the solar lamps to cover their planned setup, simply because Roxy would whine if the feng shui was anything but perfect in their new mountaintop laboratory. Self-sustaining, perfectly shielded and with the best qi flow money could buy in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, this was going to be their new home whether the crumbling stone building liked it or not.

It was an afternoon’s work, but eventually Rose had the shelves set up to her liking, all positioned for optimal light off the solar lamps, irrigation set up and ready to go, now all they needed were the fucking plants Jade wouldn’t be sending them for another month. Rose considered throwing the shelves down the flight of stairs at the far end of the cathedral and back into the underground supply tunnels from whence they came. She felt a little dumb for not realising at some point in the painstaking construction of these useless ass metal frames that this was maybe bad prioritisation on her part.

“Oh sweet, you’re already done, come help me with the beds.” Roxy called out from the side office near the altar that was to be their bedroom. Rose cast one more forlorn look at her arm chair before heading over to the bedroom.

Instead of finding a million bits of plywood needing to be individually screwed together with one of the five last alan keys in existence she found two beds that had not only been completely built, but had their sheets made up in pink on purple respectively. On the pink bed was her grinning sister. On the purple bed was a box. The box rumbled, seemingly made animate from its own anticipation at being opened. Rose looked in askance at Roxy who simply jerked her head at the box in response. With trepidation, Rose stepped over to the bed and peeled back the cardboard flaps to reveal whatever terrifying surprise awaited her.

It wasn’t Roxy’s best creation, having clearly been built from scraps. Only one ear appeared to be articulated, but the way it turned and batted almost absentmindedly, as if there wasn’t half a day’s coding worked into the one gesture, made it look lifelike. Four glowing eyes stared at Rose from out of the box and it _meowed_ at her. The eyes blinked, asynchronously but slowly, as Rose lifted the metal creature out of its box and into her arms. It was warm, slightly hotter than a flesh and blood cat but it weighed no more than your average scrawny meowbeast. She curled her arms around it and held it to her chest like a newborn babe, cooing softly almost unintentionally.

She felt Roxy’s arms wrap around her waist and pull her in tight. “I know you didn’t want to move, and that this whole ‘scientist supreme’ gig has been a major inconvenience for you, but I want to know how much I appreciate it, Rose. Figured it wasn’t going to feel like home till there was a cat in it, so I whipped you up a little something-something.” She hesitated a little before her cool broke “Do you like it?”

“I _love_ it.” Rose said nuzzling her face into the robocat’s back. It purred for her. Roxy purred too, pressing her face into Rose’s neck.

“I’m so glad. We’re going to be doing a lot of good work up here, Rose. Just the two of us, saving humanity one line of annoying fucking code at a time and I couldn’t do it without anyone else.”

Rose lifted her head off the cat’s back and dropped it onto Roxy’s shoulder, letting herself be held for a bit. It was true her research would be a little harder this far out of the city proper, and she was going to miss their old home something fierce, but she knew Roxy needed the safe space to do her work so the choice had never seemed a hard one.

“If we’re going to save the world, Roxy, we’re going to need a few more cats.” Rose leaned into her sister with a smile. For Roxy, she would make this place a home.


	2. Titsquirter the Incorrigible; Squirtsquawker the Vigilant

Rose Lalonde never loved her sister quite so much as the day she give the water purifier tentacles and a cat face. The happy little metallic abomination swam freely in their pool, eating up the heavy metals that contaminated a lot of even the cleaner water supplies and soaking up radiation to be safely disposed. Its black, hydrophobic coating looked shiny in the dim light of their lab’s atrium and it felt oily as Rose picked it up, wriggling tentacles flailing every which way as it tried to orient itself in the water it wasn’t currently swimming in.

“It’s beautiful,” Rose said, plopping the mechanical critter back in its pool to get back to work.

“That’s not even the best part,” Roxy’s grin was magnetic, as ever. “He’s rigged up to some of your implants, so he can tell what you’re looking at and check for metabolic arousal, etc. Essentially I made you an octokitten that will shoot water at anyone you get pissed at.”  
  
Rose returned Roxy’s grin, already thinking how best to position their chairs as close to the pool as possible. “How can I test it out?”

“Well, for example, I mayyyybe had to use the last of those cool little servos to add the needed articulation to his tentacles so we’re out of those.” Rose didn’t think fast enough before her brow dropped and she realised she was scowling at Roxy. A tiny fountain erupted from the water’s surface and hit her sister square in the face.

After a few moments of stunned silence the two burst out laughing and Rose fetched her sister a towel. Rose expressed this was maybe the best present she’d ever received. It wasn’t until a week later that the problems began.

 

* * *

 

Rose relaxed by the pool as she read through pages and pages of old newspaper headlines on her datapad, searching for some hint as to the origin of the monstrous android known as Lord English or more details as to how he assumed control of the Scratch AI and plunged the world into the chaos they’ve lived in ever since. It was frustrating work, the further back she looked the more signs she found that indicated English either popped into existence five seconds before taking control or he had simply always been there. She let her hand dip into the water to calm down, giving her little tentakitty a pat as it wriggled past her fingers.

Her attention was caught as Roxy comes down the stairs from the observatory and into the cathedral proper. For the high and mighty scientist supreme of civilised society’s last stand, Roxy sure dressed nothing like it. Tights, a short skirt and a very low cut top were apocalypsewear as far as the older Lalonde was concerned. “Hey, Rose, do you remember where we put that old CRT monitor? I need to pull some bits out to—”

She was interrupted as a stream of water poured out of their pool and landed squarely on Roxy’s top, soaking the material. Rose instantly lifted her hands into the air in a gesture of innocence, trying to avert her eyes as the water rendered the material see-through, showing off the lacy bra beneath. Slowly the two turned towards the pond to glare at their octocat, swimming serenely on his merry way as if he hadn't just squirted one of his owners.

“...must be some kind of glitch with the…” Roxy muttered darkly at the little robot.

“Um, I do believe we put the monitor under the stairs, do you need any help getting it up to the observatory?” Rose interrupted before Roxy could follow the logic through.

“No,” Roxy started, still distracted. “No, I’ll take it apart down here, just need some of the tubing.” She turned to head back towards the stairs only to shriek as another jet of water hit her, this time on the behind.  
  
Rose herself shrieked as well, huddling up into her chair and covering her mouth with a hand to suppress any giggles that might come out.

“You.” Roxy turned around accusingly. “It’s responding to you somehow, are you doing this on purpose?” A quick shake of the head was all she got out of Rose, who was still trying desperately to keep from laughing. “Then that must mean it’s still going off your metabolic…. oh for crying out loud, really, Rose?”

Rose must have looked confused enough for Roxy to take pity on her, as she revealed the problem with a demonstration. Grabbing herself through the wet material Roxy made a show of squeezing her breasts out in front of her, plain for Rose to see. Almost immediately a new splash of water was thrown at them by the mechanical squidcat.

“Great, just great.” Roxy burst out laughing and it wasn’t long before Rose snorted her way into joining her. Realisation caught up a few seconds into their gigglefest.

“So he’ll squirt anyone I’m mad at, or anyone I happen to be perving on?” Rose volunteered.

“Yep, guess this is the end of us ever having lady callers again.” On a point of pride Roxy never disassembled a kitty for doing what she programmed it to.

“Oh I don’t know, impromptu wet t-shirt contests hardly seem like the worst thing that could happen to someone in this lab.” Rose leered at Roxy, who was lucky not to be on the receiving end of a fourth drenching. Roxy decided to quickly level the playing field by scooping up a cupped handful of water to drench her sister with. “Okay, I maybe see your point. How about we just turn down its sensitivity?”  
  
“Nah, I have a better idea,” Roxy said with a grin that elaborated nothing.

 

* * *

 

“Do they all have names?” The android’s jade irises flexed visibly as she studied both the metal cat perched on the edge of the pool and the squid-like creature swimming within it.

“Of course they do,” Rose replied to her guest as Roxy showed off the rest of the laboratory to their second robotic visitor. “The two you are staring at are called Titsquirter the Incorrigible and Squirtsquawker the Vigilant.”  
  
“Wherever do you come up with such names?” Kanaya, through great effort, altered her appearance subroutines to reposition one of her eyebrows higher than the other. It was a facial gesture she had fallen in love with minutes after entering this enclave and meeting Rose Lalonde and she looked forward to using it as often as possible.

Rose presented another grin Kanaya admitted to finding quite appealing and slowly dropped her eyes down the android’s chassis to rest on the around the upper thorax. Nearly simultaneously, several things happened. Thanks to the speed of her processors Kanaya was able to determine the sequence as such: first, the cat sitting by the pool screamed a mechanical meowl out into the room. Second, the longer haired Lalonde shouted and made a dive to hide behind a couch in a manner commonly associated with a human reflex. Thirdly, the creature within the pool wriggled its way to the surface and fired a jet of water at Kanaya. As fast as she and her circuitclone were, Kanaya’s dodging subroutines responded only to a given set of threats and this one did not meet the required priority. As such it was only within her abilities to stand agape as the arc of water moved perfectly through the air to splash on her blouse, soaking the material. Across from her, Rose’s grin had steadily increased and her eyebrows were flexing up and down in a maddening way.

From across the room she heard Porrim and Roxy laughing, eventually she could not help but join in. “Well named, indeed.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is art for this chapter! http://themorbidoptimist.tumblr.com/post/133884372119/that-moment-when-your-sister-is-accidentally
> 
> MorbidOptimist is at least half responsible for this AU, check out her art tag for more Cyberpocalypstuck


	3. Sir Shedsalot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> art by the extremely dedicated MorbidOptimist http://themorbidoptimist.tumblr.com/tagged/Cyberpocalypstuck

Of all the behaviours Roxy’s learning algorithms had been able to decipher from scouring old footage of the near extinct creatures, Rose had not expected them to pick up shedding. However, being determinedly obstinate creatures, the growing number of robotic cats littering their apartment had indeed found a way to shed all over everything they touched, completely despite the fact that they possessed no hair. That they were shedding code instead of fur made it no less annoying.

Roxy’s forensics indicated that it seemed to be the cats’ method for sharing behaviour patterns, a kind of group learning, that had caused the outbreak to affect almost all units, but she had tracked the problem back to a single cat and a single dumb joke she had made while making him. As a result every so often she’d find herself trawling through hundreds of lines of code on a tablet only to find the error with the display, a single inopportune “>:3c” causing a segfault big enough to render the device almost useless. For the lols she rigged up a short range wireless scanner to a handheld vacuum, the device could be waved over any electronics, hunt through the code of nearby devices and clear out the misplaced characters. The result was rather comical in appearance, had there been anyone to see it, one Lalonde or the other desperately vacuuming what appeared to be a clean room because Sir Shedsalot had just walked past and given them the _look_ like the self-important digital fluffmonster he was.

Roxy never did manage to find how in the hell the virtual cat hair was getting into _already compiled_ code, simply presuming that cats were either magic or that special kind of dumb that lets you pull off miracles. Maybe both. As annoying as the problem was it didn’t seem to be particularly bad until they started rooming with a couple of androids.

 

* * *

 

One of the many things Roxy’s natural learning algorithm had taught the cats to do that Roxy could neither understand nor replicate was how to purr. The cats made the noise of purring and rumbled accordingly because Roxy programmed that into them, what they learned to do on their own was something completely different and not expressed in any visible or audible way. As neatly as her dissection of their code could tell her, the cats had some counter which incremented when something they liked happened, though each cat decided what they liked individually, and when they hit a certain threshold they would begin sending out a series of wifi signals that other cats could understand. It was all very cute, if a little scary how intelligent the little monsters were getting. Roxy wasn’t surprised to find this runaway behaviour came from the king of coding surprises, his rolypolyness, Sir Shedsalot.

She had rigged up a little reader for herself, to let her know which cats were purring at any given time and see if she could notice any patterns or issues with the behaviour. By the time she did find something significant she’d almost completely forgotten the device existed, and it sat buzzing on the coffee table for several seconds before she picked it up and read out the display. Two new cats had been detected purring in the vicinity. This didn’t make a like of sense to Roxy, who was dead sure that all cats had already been infected with the purring behaviour months ago. She checked the total number of cats in the area and found they were indeed up by two on the cat count. It took an embarrassing amount of time for humanity’s greatest scientist to look across at the other end of the coffee table and realise that, as far as her little device was concerned, their two android houseguests were no different than their many cats. And that they were purring back.

One flustered conversation later and some quick scans revealed that the Maryams had been infected with the behaviour in their short time at the lab, and (Roxy didn’t even need to check, she just _knew_ the little bastard was behind it) they had indeed been infected by Sir Shedsalot. Though obviously concerned that their autonomic functions had been so easily converted, neither android seemed overly distressed with the purring itself.

“When your face is as rigid as ours, you learn to appreciate what expressions you can make.” Explained Porrim. “You should’ve seen poor Aradia, could barely move her face she was so poorly articulated. Always looked so sullen.”

On a lark, Roxy offered to upload the original purring software she’d built for the cats so that they could replicate the noise in an audible way, and was surprised to find both agreed. It took some fiddling with the strange ports built into their side, a leftover from their construction they liked to refer to as grubscars, but Roxy was eventually able to upload both the purring software and some additional protections to stop anything else from altering their behaviour without their consent. The slapdash barrier didn’t last a single night against Sir Shedsalot.

 

* * *

 

“Roxy.” One of the androids was above her, eyes glowing faintly in the dark of their bedroom. Roxy decided that for at least the next two hours she wasn’t going to give the pinnacle of modern robotics anymore of her attention. Then Kanaya shook her a little more violently and Roxy was forced to crack her eyes back open. It was clearly ass o’clock and Rose was still sleeping peacefully beside her, the other Maryam unit was lying still on the second bed, clearly inactive. It was ass o’clock and she did not feel like being a good host. She went back to sleep.

“Roxy, please. I need your help.” Roxy cracked her eyes open for the third time and started up at the android in something akin to grumpy disbelief. The green girls weren’t perfect with facial expressions but Kanaya was clearly making an effort to look pitiable. Roxy briefly wondered if the androids could cry before deciding she didn’t want to find out. Extricating herself carefully from the arm wrapped around her waist she padded back out to the living room with the android in tow.

“What seems to be the trouble, babe? Rose’ll get jealous if I tell her you kept me up all night long.” One of the few emotions Kanaya excelled at displaying was embarrassment, Roxy decided it might just be worth waking up this early to get to see that pretty metal face blush with the subtle green phosphorescence unique to the Maryam line.

“Can’t you tell? It’s my hair.” Roxy couldn’t tell because her skills of perception were intimately tied to how much caffeine she had in her system at this time of morning, but once her attention had been directed it was pretty hard not to notice. The otherwise perfect coiffe afforded only to those who have a small chunk of their brain dedicated to telling their hair follicles what to do had become an eldritch abomination of snarls, tangles and razor sharp black mop top pointing every which way. In short, Miss Kanaya Maryam was maybe the first android in history to have a bad hair day. It took a lot of professionalism not to laugh at a sight like that, professionalism Roxy Lalonde did not have as she burst out laughing immediately, continuing until a metal hand closed around her mouth to shut her up.

“I don’t know why you are laughing at a time like this clearly this issue is a result of the software you installed last night and I would very much like you to correct it at once please.” The stacatto, matter of fact way Kanaya spoke every word had a habit of turning her truly flustered sentences into very polite machine gun fire and it was not long before Roxy relented. One cup of coffee later, they were situated in Roxy’s office in what had once been the cathedral’s bell tower and was now a very swankily appointed observatory. Kanaya was dressed up in a number of sensors sensitive enough to notice if even one of those pointy black hairs shifted with a few wires shoved into her grubscars so that Roxy could run troubleshooting on her.

It was slow work, Roxy trawling through test after test to locate where the error was occurring and trying to figure out how to undo it. It was slower from the lack of assistance, as Kanaya refused to allow Porrim or Rose to see her until she’d been restored to her former glory. Roxy wouldn’t have pegged her for vain beforehand, but as the hours rolled past and the android positively squirmed in position, cross legged on the ground below Roxy, the human could see her hair was clearly a point of pride.

As the afternoon rolled around Roxy could feel her enthusiasm for the work going, and with it her ability to concentrate. It was looking increasingly like this would be a problem they wouldn’t solve in a day, as hard on Kanaya as that might be. She reached out a hand to hold to the android’s cheek, uncertain how to break the disappointing news but before she could open her mouth Kanaya began to purr for the first time. The sound was very much like a cat’s, but so much richer for coming from a larger machine. It rumbled across every inch of her and Roxy could feel it through the skin she had in contact with the mechanical girl sitting below her.

“Son of a bitch,” was all she said as the realisation hit her and she dashed from the room, leaving a slightly distressed android in her wake. When she returned a few seconds later with a handheld vacuum cleaner and pressed it into Kanaya’s bedhead she was sure the troll squeaked, though only for a second. It took about that long for the automated cleanup to locate and eliminate the problem, allowing Kanaya’s hair to seamlessly shift back into its usual pattern. After the perfectly enunciated thank yous and bone crushing steel hug had been delivered, Roxy took the time to explain the concept of digital cat hair and recommended the Maryams not let the cats sleep on them at night. In the interests of protecting the pets under her roof Roxy didn’t disclose the identity of the culprit, though she knew exactly who was responsible and exactly how she planned to get her revenge on the little cyberfluff-laden monster.

 

* * *

 

Sir Shedsalot was preening by the pool in the entrance hall when Jade arrived. Roxy still couldn’t judge just how intelligent the cats were but she was sure he was the smartest, so she very much hoped that he understood some of the transaction that took place. The archaic circular device came mounted with a fluffy dog’s tail, a touch of Jade’s own to the collaborative project. Roxy fixed the digital car hair remover to the top of the roomba and set it down on the floor. Sir Shedsalot pretended not to notice, or at least that was Roxy’s interpretation of the casual flick of his head.

Roxy lifted and accusing finger towards her most dastardly creation and addressed the roomba, even as she turned it on with her foot. “Kill.” Somewhere in whatever instincts her creation had managed to inherit from his biological predecessors, Sir Shedsalot seemed to have remembered that dogs chase cats. The roomba came to life with a bark and angled towards the no longer preening cat. Sir Shedsalot remembered that when dogs chase, cats run, and he bolted from the room not to be seen again for the next week.


	4. Alphabet Cat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> art by the ever creative MorbidOptimist http://themorbidoptimist.tumblr.com/tagged/Cyberpocalypstuck

“—I’m just saying, look, I’m one hundred percent on board with the whole find the matriorb unite the trolls collect all the chaos emeralds plan, but I’m saying here maybe we fail. Maybe the matriorb’s a myth. Maybe we get there too late and there’s not enough trolls left to scrape together a production line. It sucks but we’ve got to consider it. So let me tell you, if we had to try and, using just you two, if we tried to build a new troll from scratch what would be the hardest part?”

Roxy was, as far as Porrim could tell, adorably insufferable once she really got an idea into her head. The four of them had been talking on the couches in front of the fireplace for hours, of course the fireplace was completely artificial, the couches were made of an upholstery that didn’t even try to pretend it was leather and “talking” would be less appropriate than “listening to Roxy monologue about constructing the troll race”.

It was Kanaya who filled the void, attempting to provide Roxy with what she thought was the correct answer “Well I think for starters, reproducing our abilities as Rainbow Drinkers would be the most immediate issue, there are scarce enough resources for the level of radiation shielding necessary to—”

“That’s right, it’s the voice boxes!” Interrupted Roxy cheerfully. “Even though almost every android out there has language processing nearly none of them are built with voice boxes because the fuckers are too hard to manufacture reliably and Crockercorp didn’t exactly want its work force to be able to talk back when they started pumping out the carapaces. So, if we’re going to be building a whole bunch of trolls we can’t afford to go with the whole handcrafted fancybusiness you two have going on, we’re going to need something we can mass manufacture and that means…”

Porrim allowed herself to tune out as Roxy continued talking. The human was no less animated for her less than attentive audience, a sly glance to the side confirmed that Rose and Kanaya seemed more interested in pressing into each other than listening to Roxy’s ranting. Outside the wind howled and distant thunder roared, Porrim was very glad she and Kanaya had been able to take sanctuary here while Kanaya acclimated to her repairs. The Maryam units might have the finest radiation shielding an android could hope to bear, but that didn’t make the wasteland pleasant by any stretch of the imagination. Electrical storms had a habit of turning them, the wind could scour their skin to unpleasant hues and everything was just so dead and ugly. The sole consolation so far had been the nights when the winds were calm, when the vastly depleted atmosphere would let them see through to such a magnitude of stars as none of her recordings could recall a human having ever seen. “That’s where we belong,” she’d said to Kanaya, lying on the bare rock and staring up. “Not on this miserable planet but up there, among the stars. Trolls don’t belong on Earth.” Kanaya has not said anything in response, but simply snuggled in closer to her circuitclone.  
  


“Which is why!” The crescendo of Roxy’s enthusiasm snapped her back to the present. Daydreaming was such an infuriating trait to gift an AI with, not for the first time Porrim cursed her manufacturer’s seemingly bizarre desire to create not just a perfect machine but a new form of life. She’d rather be perfect and look a little less flighty for it. “I!” Right, still paying attention to Roxy. “Have made this.”

Roxy finished her sentence with a flourish and produced a mechanical cat onto the table. As per her signature designs the cat had been painted matte black and gifted with two extra eyes on its forehead, the formerly unintentional asynchronous blink now her trademark. Roxy had a lot of practice at making cats now, Porrim had noticed at least half a dozen being constructed during her stay.

“It’s um, lovely?” Kanaya offered, reaching out to pat the cat. She retrieved her hand much sooner than she had extended it, as the cat opened its mouth on her approach and began to screech out.

“Zed, Why, Ecks, Double You, Vee, You…” and further on down the alphabet. It was a full minute and a half before it closed its mouth and began pantomiming grooming itself, as all of Roxy’s catbots were wont to do.

“I know, I know, it seems like so much so soon, but there’s still a lot of work to go before that’s a fully functional voicebox. Still! My early projections point to us being able to manufacture those babies at a rate _twenty times_ as efficient as all previous models and—”

“Roxy.” Porrim interrupted, lest Roxy spend another thirty minutes ranting. “Why did you make it a cat?” Roxy blinked at Porrim for a few seconds, as if she didn’t understand the nature of the question _and maybe,_ thought Porrim, _she really doesn’t._

“Well I had to put the voicebox _somewhere_ and I knew if I just left it on my desk I would lose it, the thing’s like the size of my thumb, it’d be gone, forever, poof, off into the void. So I built a cat to put it in.” Roxy seemed pretty satisfied with her explanation.

“So based on your desire to not lose this object you decided to embed it in an autonomous creature who as far as I can see you have no way of commanding. In addition to this you designed its chassis to be virtually identical to every other cat in this building. How exactly are you planning to differentiate it from its cohort?”

“Well it’s the only one can sing the alphabet backwards, isn’t it?”

 

* * *

 

_Years in the future, but not many_

A lone wanderer picks through the wreckage of the Lalonde laboratory not so much searching as he is browsing the shattered masonry, glass and electronics. His slender form ghosts over the rubble, face a ghostly white in the moonlight, layers of lead paint on his metal skin a sign of one who’s wandered for too long in search of a thing that maybe doesn’t exist anymore.

“El. Kay. J-j-j-j-jay. Kay. J-j-j-j-jay. Eye. Hayche. Gee. Gee. Gee.” The wanderer bends down to lift the small hardy creature up for inspection. He says no word of greeting. The creature has metal skin, as does he, it has survived the extinction of its friends, another trait they have in common. He retrieves some paint from his kit and slathers it on the creature to ensure it will survive what radiation remains out in the wasteland, drawing a small skull across its face for decoration.

“Eff. You. Eff. Eeeeeeeeeeee. Dea. Ceekrkzz.” The creature makes no protest as Kurloz removes its vocal box and discards the chip to the ground. At last, now that they are both silent they are truly kin. Kurloz feels he can once again resume his journey with a new companion, wandering off into the wasteland, not so much searching as he is browsing the shattered remnants of the world.


	5. Poetry Cat and Haiku Cat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> art as always by the lovely MorbidOptimist  
> All of it available at http://themorbidoptimist.tumblr.com/tagged/Cyberpocalypstuck

“Aw Rose, you shouldn’t have!” Roxy proclaimed excitedly with a tone that said yes, yes you should have; “Though I gotta admit if we’re both going to start giving each other cats as presents the next few birthdays are going to be a little predictable.”

Rose nuzzled a kiss into her face to shut her up. “He’s more than just your standard kitty. Take a look.” She handed Roxy a datapad.

Roxy squinted at the text for a time before scrolling down. It was definitely the programming for the cat but it wasn’t in a language she recognised. Some kind of fifth gen thing with a natural language input system made to read… oh my god this was all in iambic pentameter. She tried editing a line to remove a syllable and indeed an alert popped up identifying the line as invalid.

“Did you… Is it all like this? Did you program a cat entirely with poetry?” Her mouth was agape and Rose was nothing but grins. The cat itself was audibly purring and curling up in her lap.

“It took some time, and a bit of help from a friend, it’s somewhat esoteric and we maybe tweaked the definition of a what constitutes a valid parameter space for problem solving, really the hard part was deciding to go with this or rhyming couplets but—”

“Rose.” Roxy cut her off before the family tongue took her on a rambling tour of the next half hour. “Thank you, I love it.” They found a way to cuddle around the little robot cat, still purring and rubbing himself up against Roxy’s middle.

Roxy continued browsing the code, getting herself thoroughly acquainted with the inner workings of her wordy little kitty. Looks like nothing particularly new in terms of functionality, and she couldn’t pass this off to Derse or Prospit as something that was actually helping the colonies, but it was still a pretty novel way to approach some of the problems of building an AI of even this low calibre. Plus some of it was straight up hilarious.

“Well I can’t very well call it Shakespearean poetry if it doesn’t have any dick jokes, now can I?” Replied Rose after Roxy drew her attention to one particularly salacious line of code. “Oh by the way please don’t tell Dave I said that or he’ll discover classical literature. My only regret is that I couldn’t do the entire thing in haiku like I had planned to begin with, but sadly it just wasn’t possible.”

Roxy thought on that for a bit before replying. “Bet you it is.”

Rose shifted from her curled up position at Roxy’s side. “I think you misunderstood, dear sister, when I said it wasn’t possible, I didn’t mean that I wasn’t up to the task, I meant that it is not a thing that can be done.”

“So what do I win if I can do it?”

 

* * *

 

Monitors lit up with warnings indicating a virulent attack on the power supply back at Derse. Non-essentials were starting to fail, soon the city would be plunged into darkness and from there, if the virus got its way, Prospit would be next. Once the spread was complete total shutdown would occur and the air filtration would lock up. Life support systems would crash. Even if someone managed to restart things it would take too long to repair the damage. The last free bastions of the human race were facing their extinction.

Roxy threw garbage across the room to clear access to the neural upload. Her hands flew as she welded equipment to the platform and completed three months of work in two minutes. She’d promised Rose she wouldn’t be deep diving for another 18 months, too many of her predecessors had burnt out in the net fighting one threat or another, but the Scientist Supreme was humanity’s first and last line of defence in the face of the unknown, and if she didn’t go in there after the virus then no one else would.

Also it was sort of her fault.

Rose held her hand as Roxy lay on the neural upload and waited for her brain to go digital. “I love you,” Rose said with a squeeze, tears of worry already forming at the corners of her eyes.

“I know,” replied Roxy, not really sure what else to do.

“If you die with your last words as a fucking Star Wars reference I will bring you back just so I can kill you myself.” Rose choked out the threat with something that might have been a laugh or a sob and Roxy grinned as the consciousness transfer took her.

Six months from now she was expecting to have finished the cushy upload sequence that would take her into the net. With the hacked together interface she’d just finished building it was like getting punched in the face with a building, into a taller building, which promptly collapsed. Every nerve in her body screamed as they responded to the digitised inputs. She was grateful the first stage of the upload involved cutting off all control of her physical body otherwise she’s quite sure she would have screamed loud enough to wake the dead and pissed herself, neither of which would have been pleasant for Rose to deal with while Roxy got to business in the cyber world. The complete lack of safety features meant there was no scan to make sure she was still herself, no checks to make sure the upload hadn’t introduced some fancy new lesions to her grey matter. All said, it was a damn sight faster than usual. Flexing her extended consciousness Roxy identified the path to the Derse power terminal and prepared for a long distance relationship with her own body.

Roxy understood why some people were still scared of uploading, but she had never shared their concerns. By its nature the human mind couldn’t really grasp the scope of what it was being made to do and as such everything got set in human terms, human understandings. When Roxy set foot in the power terminal her feet made contact with the ground. That was her brain’s way of rationalising her connection to the terminal, simply rerouted through the nerve endings normally used by her feet. For convenience Roxy usually programmed a defensive suite that felt like cushy boots between her and contact with the server. The more protected she was from the server she was in, the cushier the boots, once she could start to feel the texture of the place (smooth and flat if she had a good connection, gravelly if her internet was patchy) she knew she was more open to any kind of attack. Today she was barefoot and the power terminal felt like walking on a bed of nails. She’d travelled through on emergency comms channels, set up by her predecessor, the late great Bro Strider, for just such an emergency as something attacking their net connections or the power supply itself. Roxy had personally reinforced the physical paths from her lab to Derse when she got started, the chain of wireless modems, each with enough independent battery power to last her an hour, but the connection was going to be prickly as fuck every second of it.

Something slithered past her left flank, or what her brain told her was her left flank and what her mind rationally realised was a probe picking up on the presence she was making in the system. Roxy walked her body through the actions of lifting up her hood and draping it over her head, engaging her personal stealth functions. These babies she didn’t need to install in the new platform, they came with her wherever she went. When she’d taken the gig as Scientist Supreme the first thing she’d done with all that sweet grant money was paid a neurosurgeon the small fortune required to graft a line of experimental nanotech processors to the lesion in her brain. She’d won the dead patch of grey matter off a shoddy neural link at age fifteen, frying as she pulled out of the digital equivalent of an exploding building. One afternoon of getting intimate with an artificially stabilised set of surgical tools and it was goodbye seizures, hello custom-built cyber stealth mode. With the subroutines removing her presence from any watching protocols the blue and black outfit of her online avatar dispersed into nothing but twilight and stars, a nice visual element, however unnecessary.

She could walk forward without fear of detection, though she still felt the ghost of security checks pass over her as she ventured further into the system. Whichever jackass had designed this archaic crap had decided that proper resource allocation was for chumps, the result was not a neat orderly map of system functions, power grid locations, etc. etc that she’d been hoping for. Nothing so simple for Roxy Lalonde. Instead the thing visualised as a downward spiral, branches fractaling out with what might be important data and what might just be bureaucratic bullshit. Roxy was always disturbed when diving to find exactly how much paperwork had survived the apocalypse and exactly how many jerks were still saving every file to their desktop. After a few minutes of poking her head around poorly labelled directories Roxy gave up on searching manually and started work on getting some backup in here. When she got everyone out of this mess she was going to give power central’s IT department a call and make some _recommendations_. For now she got to play script kiddie and looked up some of her old work, safely stored away on a publicly accessible site covered in digital glitter and cat gifs. Underneath the frankly awesome exterior she dug up some quick tools for searching and entered the details they’d need to sniff out the tracks of the encroaching virus.

It didn’t take long for her weekend of dicking around with searching algorithms four years ago to pay dividends and she was hot on the trail of the intruder. The first node she reached was inoperable, it would take a lot longer to debug and frankly she didn’t have the time with the virus still active. She did a quick scan of which nodes it had communicated with last to trace the virus. If she could locate an active instance of the damn thing then she could patch the code and send out a much more directed copy to fix this whole mess, lickety split, disaster avoided. She found one about five jumps later and realised exactly what she was dealing with. She also realised she was maybe a little screwed. Once the attack had started her initial checks had indicated that the threat had likely come from her own lab, though she was sure she’d been shielding everything experimental. She expected to find one of her half-finished bombs in here wrecking up the joint. She hadn’t been expecting Haiku Cat.

He’d gotten big. AI rendered in digital space the same as a user would, though it was always a bit of a toss up as to how your brain would interpret whatever it was seeing. As a pet project he might have looked like the adorable kitten he was, now, with his code smeared across an entire city’s lighting system, he looked like Chernabog unfurling himself on top of Bald Mountain. Roxy wasn’t sure if she’d even seen Fantasia and yet somehow the mental connection was there.

The good news was the cat wasn’t an actively malicious program and as such she didn’t need to worry about any kind of coordination in its spread or the damage it would cause. The bad news was if she wanted to fix this she was going to need to do it in the esoteric language she programmed on a bet to piss Rose off. She was going to need to save the last free cities of humanity _in haiku_.

“Rose,” Roxy spoke to the air but two fingers to her throat told the interpreter to set up a communication channel to home. She didn’t have time to type and she hadn’t set up proper chat protocols yet so Rose would probably get the shock of her life when Roxy’s unconscious husk opened its mouth and started talking. “I’m sending you the info on what I’m seeing here.” Roxy kept her fingers on her jugular while she waited for Rose to review the files popping up on screen, the gesture was the only thing keeping her connected to her body’s ears.

“Are you kidding me? How is Haiku Cat doing this?” Rose’s voice came distantly, as if spoken at the end of a long corridor, or across a pool.

“No idea, but I can fix it. The problem is I don’t know if I can fix it and then write the solution in haiku. I need your help, Rose, I need that big ol’ poetry brain you keep on your shoulders to do its magic. Humanity needs your leet poet hacks, Rose.”

There was a pause at the other end of the line before Rose responded. “While I admit that my poet hacks are simply the leetest there is to find, I believe we discussed this.”

“Oh my god Rose you are not throwing this in my face when this much is at sta—”

“I’m fairly sure the exact words were ‘I, Rose Lalonde, am in fact, not miss smarty-pants the smartiest word lady to ever exist because Roxy Lalonde, queen of all syllables, has defeated me in this game of cat makery.’” Rose’s voice came distantly, as if spoken at the end of a long corridor in an incredibly smug fucking tone.

“Uh-huh. So are you going to help me save the city or am I going to have to bribe you into being a good human?”

“That depends on what you’re planning on bribing me with.”

“Welp in about two hours I’ll be able to trade you a city full of dead people who lost their electromagnetic shielding because some flighty broad was salty about losing a bet, but it might be a bit moot at that point.”

“How about we just say you’re doing the dishes tonight.”

“Babe, you pull this off and I will do the dishes all fucking month. The dishes will be my home, my happy place. You will be able to stick a fork in these dishes that’s how done they’ll be.”

“Well get ready to scrub then, I uploaded it a few seconds ago, should be coming online in a moment. Didn’t have time to rig up a delivery system so the patch is going on your right arm.” Roxy made a fist and watched her right arm light up with foxfire. With her left arm she carefully peeled off her hood, taking down her cloaking measures with it. The cat’s eyes swivelled independently of each other to focus on her and she’d be a liar if she said that didn’t scare her just a little bit. With no shields to speak of that thing could rip right through her like tissue paper. It wouldn’t even really be an attack, the way this thing was going she would pretty much be toast if it tried to sit on her. All it would take is that cat trying to occupy the space she was occupying and half of what the world regarded as Roxy Lalonde would be overwritten. So she was going to try to do that to it first.

“Heeeere kitty kitty,” Roxy cooed, because if she was hunting cybercats then no way was she not saying something super cool like that. Thankfully in the absence of a proper text client Rose would not be informed that Roxy was wasting time being a huge dork with all of humanity on the line. She stretched out an arm towards the beast, doing her best to thought-project the image of herself posing as she always did when she had a treat. “Mama’s got something for you.” As it lumbered closer Roxy was stunned to find her previous estimate of its size was turning out to be way short of the reality of the situation. Screw sitting on her, this thing could eat her whole. If she fucked this up she would die screaming like the extra in a B movie, or the idiot who thinks Godzilla is his friend five seconds before getting death breathed into nuclear oblivion. The cat reared back towards the node it had come from as Roxy’s panic temporarily polluted her thought projections. She did her best to think calm thoughts, to think of belly rubs and cuddles and soft things to sleep on. It worked, the cat moving closer into her and _purring_. She could see it how they saw it now, in the digital world. It was like a thousand warm sunbeams stretching out from its skin. It said happy and safe and home in catspeak to anyone who knew how to see. It got close enough for her to reach out and touch. She punched it in the snout.

“BAD KITTY” Roxy shouted out at the empty vista of power central’s awfully organised file system. Haiku Cat began to glow from the nose down with her foxfire. He pawed at his nose but that only made the fire spread faster. Before long the monster was nothing but white light and then he was disappearing, functions and objects being removed from their host locations. Roxy sighed with relief as the last of it went, leaving her alone in the node. Within a minute normal flow of data returned, the healthy trickle of input and output. A quick check of the internal diagnostics programs showed precisely one foreign system within all directories. She touched a hand to her throat and asked Rose to bring her home.

Roxy sat up groggily on the table. She pressed a hand to the connection port on the back of her neck, still warm where her personality had fed out of her body and into the net. “So how many cats did we make before one almost destroyed the last bastion of human civilisation?”

“They’re cats, Roxy. I’m surprised the first one didn’t try something.”

 

* * *

 

Of all the cats in the cathedral, many have been said to be naughty at one point or another. Rose is of the opinion that given they’re occupying former catholic turf it only seems right to assume that all cats are made innate with sin and are therefore universally naughty kitties. But only one of the robotic cats slinking around the few remaining pews has the words engraved on its back and only one has a special lead lined casing to prevent anyone trying to read its mind and find the category C virus its creator calls a winning personality. The only Lalonde cat forbidden from playing outdoors sleeps most of the day and dreams of light. On the other side of the cathedral, standing in front of the makeshift kitchen sink, Roxy grumbled and washed the dishes.


End file.
